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Latin Syntax in Fifty Years of Generative Grammar Catalan Journal of Linguistics 16, 2017 5-17 Latin Syntax in Fifty Years of Generative Grammar Jaume Mateu Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [email protected] Renato Oniga Università degli Studi di Udine [email protected] Fifty years have passed since the first attempt to apply generative grammar methods to Latin syntax. The well-known book by Robin Tolmach Lakoff, published in 1968 by the MIT Press with the title of Abstract Syntax and Latin Complementation, was presented as a dissertation in linguistics at Harvard University in 1967, with the title of Studies in the Transformational Grammar of Latin. The Complement System.1 In order to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, we thought it was appropriate to publish a collection of papers written by some distinguished specialists who approach the study of Latin syntax from a generative perspective. Their works show the import- ant research that is being currently carried out in this active field. In this introduction, we would like to briefly trace the development of this research area, trying to emphasize elements of continuity, changes, results, and problems. Although generative grammar has provided very important contributions to phonology and morphology as well, it is nonetheless clear that, from the very beginning, its theoretical focus has been on syntax.2 1. The generative research project The development of generative studies on Latin language has been conditioned by the internal evolution of the syntactic theory in general linguistics. As is well known, in the history of generative grammar we can identify different stages, which schematically bring us back to the success of some of the main books pub- lished by Noam Chomsky. The beginning can be traced back to the first trans- formational phase, from Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957) to the so-called “Standard Theory” of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965). A second phase goes from the “Extended Standard Theory” (Chomsky 1973) to Lectures on Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981). In the end, as a continuation of the so- 1. Lakoff (1967). See the discussion of Lakoff’s book by Touratier (1969). 2. Cf. Bortolussi (2006) for a more general history of generative grammar applied to ancient languag- es. See also Quetglas (1985/2006) for an excellent review of some relevant generative approaches to Latin linguistics. ISSN 1695-6885 (in press); 2014-9719 (online) https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/catjl.213 6 CatJL 16, 2017 Jaume Mateu; Renato Oniga called “Principles and Parameters” framework, we get to The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). In the last decades, generative linguistics has further evolved and differentiated in a wide range of orientations (e.g., see Chomsky, Gallego & Ott 2017). Generative grammar, by its nature, is constantly evolving: the aim of this school of thought is not the achievement of definitive truths, since every theoretical elabo- ration is considered as temporary. Although the continuous changes in the theo- retical framework have somehow limited the success of generative grammar, two general assumptions on the nature of human language and the structure of scientific theories have remained unchanged throughout its whole history. We have to keep these assumptions in mind, in order to clearly understand the nature of this research and in order to avoid requiring from it something different from its nature. Firstly, generative grammar assumes the nature of language as a very com- plex phenomenon. Therefore, the generative approach rejects all opinions reducing grammar to something banal, scholastic or prescriptive. Starting from the famous controversy of Chomsky against Skinner’s behaviorism (Chomsky 1959), gen- erative linguists have always believed that language should not be reduced to a behavioral system imposed by the environment or by the education. The linguistic research should not only reach a descriptive adequacy, but also an explicative ade- quacy, and this is only possible within a more general theoretical framework, i.e., a general theory of language whose main focus is the study of so-called “Universal Grammar”. As a matter of fact, the existence of a Universal Grammar, from which particular grammars of the single languages can arise, is postulated for two reasons. Firstly, it states that the grammar of each language does not have an indefinite variability, but is subject to a series of universal principles. Secondly, it explains the naturalness and simplicity of language acquisition by children, even without a particular teaching, only on the basis of exposure to a flow of linguistic data from the input/environment. This conception of language is strictly bound to the second essential postulate of generative grammar, i.e. the conception of science as a continuous refinement of theories, considered as approximations to an ultimate reality, which we will never be able to own in a definite form. Any theory should have the characteristic of being capable to be confirmed or falsified by the observation of data, and so no theory can be proved to be true at all. Therefore, the scientific progress not only consists on the accumulation of new observations of facts, but mostly on the subsequent theoretical hypotheses, increasingly refined and general. It is the same method currently used in natural sciences, which has been object of reflection by the epistemologist Karl Popper (1935). In this hypothetical-deductive conception of scientific research, “grammar” is considered as a theory of language, an abstract mechanism able to explain the particular characteristics of human language. It follows that, by its nature, generative grammar is characterized by a for- mal approach. The technical term “to generate”, drawn from mathematics, means “to enumerate explicitly”, in order to formally describe infinite sets like human languages by means of a finite set of primitive elements and formal operations. Therefore, the leading characteristic of generative grammar is the use of formaliza- Latin Syntax in Fifty Years of Generative Grammar CatJL 16, 2017 7 tion. From origins to today, the typical generative style of syntactic investigation has often been based on phrase structure and derivations, and the syntactic tree has often been the typical formal tool used with the purpose of providing an explicit structural description for any sentence. According to what has been said so far, we can affirm the existence of a unitary “Chomskyan program”, which does not have to be identified with a single thesis supported by this or that single scholar, but that forms a unitary style of research, which is applicable to the study of language in general or of specific languages.3 As is often the case for every research method in human sciences, this view is not acknowledged by all linguists, particularly by many of those who deal with ancient languages. We can find some scholars, whose aim is the elaboration of the- ories intended as perfect and not falsifiable systems, according to a certain reading of the Saussurean structuralism. We can also find many other scholars, who entirely deny the possibility of building general abstract theories, confining their activity to the collection and classification of data in always partial and changeable systems, according to another reading of the same structuralist tradition. This is why, as we will see, generative approaches have always been a minority in the field of Latin linguistics, but they have nonetheless provided useful contributions towards a more systematic, explanatory, and accurate analysis of the Latin language. Thanks to the improvements accomplished in all the fields by generative gram- mar in the last years (see below), it is now possible to display the entire structure of Latin grammar in a unitary generative framework (Oniga 2004/2007; 2014). The formal description of many seemingly odd features of Latin grammar using a small number of simple and universal principles has also proved to be useful for the teaching of the language (Oniga, Iovino & Giusti 2011). 2. The transformational origins The first generative approaches to Latin syntax adopted Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) transformational perspective. Although in these works Chomsky himself did not deal with classical languages, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s a widespread belief among classicists was that this research perspective could have useful appli- cations to Latin.4 These studies are characterized by the central role played by the concept of “transformation”. At first, we have a deep syntactic structure produced by phrase structure rules, necessary for the semantic interpretation, which is then modified by a certain number of transformations, which may add, move or remove elements, eventually reaching the form of the surface structure of the sentence. 3. See Uriagereka (1998), Haegeman (2006), Honda & O’Neil (2007), and Larson (2010), for some pedagogical introductions to “thinking syntactically” from a generative perspective. Readers who are interested in learning about formal approaches to syntax but are not (quite) familiar with the Chomskian perspective are invited to consult these handbooks. Our recommendation is to do it in an order inverse to the chronological one: cf. the basic introductions by Larson (2010) and Honda & O’Neil (2007), the intermediate one by Haegeman (2006), and the “advanced” introduction to minimalist syntax by Uriagereka (1998). 4. For example, see the remark by Guiraud (1972) and the review by Maraldi (1975). 8 CatJL 16, 2017 Jaume Mateu; Renato Oniga The already mentioned work by Lakoff (1968) is the most complete analysis of Latin subordination in this framework, following the model that was previously elaborated by generative linguists for the description of English. Two other linguistic dissertations followed the one by Lakoff, but were not published: Binkert (1970) tried to provide an explanation of the Latin cases alongside prepositional constructs, with the hypothesis of the existence of abstract prepositions in deep structure, similarly to Lakoff’s use of abstract verbs, while Conlin (1973) put forward new hypotheses on the controversial concept of transitivity.
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